Content Curation Strategies for Social Media Managers

At the heart of every good marketing strategy, is content curation. Sometimes, it can be an art and other times it is a science of finding good quality for social media accounts that you manage as part of your job.

By employing content curation to your social media marketing strategy, you can increase the brand’s audience, and once you have a large following, you can share your content with a larger number of people.

Content curation can look like a herculean task if you are a social media manager, but the truth is, if you leave aside the amount of time that it takes to find quality content, content curation can be quite simple.

In fact, with a few good strategies in place, you can accomplish the task within minutes and without losing the hair on your head.

Have a content plan

Creating a content calendar and sticking to it is of the utmost importance. If you think that you might just wing it when the time comes, it’s not going to work in your favor, and it might just leave you more frustrated.

Having a content calendar can help you in the long run, because you won’t have to think constantly about what kind of content you need to publish, or the type of content that you want to create.

In the event that you want to promote an event or a campaign, you can tweak your content calendar a little bit, or work around it. But, in theory, you should, at least, try to plan out a calendar for the entire month, well ahead of time.

In a 2015 study, it has been found that around 69% of companies make use of an editorial calendar in their content marketing strategy. 69% is a huge number, and the fact that these companies are using calendar must mean there is a lot of benefit that comes from calendar.

Why do social media managers need a content plan

An advantage of using a content calendar is that you can map out any content that is time-sensitive and ensure that it goes out on time.

In many companies, social media managers are constantly in touch with the PR department so that any important news that needs to be published on the company’s social media channels gets published at the right time.

A content plan enables you to see the type of content that you might have posted in earlier months and depending on that information, you can judge whether you should make any changes or adjustments to the current content that you might be deciding to publish.

With a content plan at hand, you will always have a record of everything that you published on your social media channels. It also makes your job easier, because rather than doing guesswork, you can just double check previous plans and be on your way.

Use a content discovery tool for content curation

Most social media managers probably already use a good content curation tool that helps them get fresh content for their company’s social media pages.

Using a tool helps you achieve your tasks quicker without the stress of having to find the content yourself. Of course, once you find it, you will have to go through it to ensure that is it relates to what your brand is trying to project and that is also something that your audience will find relevant.

If you are looking for other content discovery tools that can help you get the job done, here are a few to help you out.

With this bookmarking service you can save web content from platforms like Facebook, Twitter and more. Pocket allows you to save this content directly to their dashboard.

If you are someone who loves organization, well Pocket, is the application for you. It lets you save all the content and keep it neatly organized under categories so that you can come back at a later time and browse through the saved content with ease.

It also means that you don’t have to look around too much to find the content that you were looking for. If you need to share your content, you can share it directly from the dashboard via email, Twitter or Facebook.

You can view all content that is currently trending under the Recommendations sections, and Pocket also allows you to add this to your dashboard. Pocket is a superb tool because you can synchronize all your content across various platforms!

Getting to know breaking news and current affairs can’t get any easier if you are using the Storify application. You can look at various social media websites where Storify will aggregate breaking news content, event news, campaigns, memes and just about anything related to a brand.

If you have to create stories of your own, or edit stories that you have already found, you can do that via Storify. It also lets you embed tweets, images or video clips.

Best of all, you can publish the stories you create almost everywhere, including social media channels or on your websites. Also, once you share the story, anyone who is mentioned in the story is automatically notified, making sharing, a really simple activity.

It can be quite an overwhelming task to find or create new content that you can use on your social media pages to increase engagement. With DrumUp, that task becomes really simple, and you can start sharing awesome content within a matter of minutes.

DrumUp is a complete social media management tool that allows you to find content based on keywords that you into the settings of the application.

You can easily add multiple accounts to the dashboard, so if you are a social media manager managing various company accounts, you don’t have to log in and out every time you want to schedule content.

The application allows you to share the discovered content to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages. You can either schedule the content ahead of time, or share it there and then.

DrumUp also offers a handy plugin for Chrome that helps find and share content relevant to the article you may be browsing.

Feedly is an RSS reader, a cool tool which allows you to keep up with a variety of RSS feeds that you can choose. It lets you browse content – large publications, websites, blogs, social media channels and even YouTube channels.

Once you add your favorite RSS feeds, you can categorize them and wait for the content to start flowing in. If you want to share something you read, you can easily share it.

Feedly can also be integrated with a number of other applications like Tello, OneNote 365 and Evernote.

Use social media networks for content curation

Your audience is a great resource that you can use to find content. As a social media manager, it is your job to keep an eye on all the conversation that are happening around your brand, and also part of your job to participate in these conversations.

Once you start becoming a part of online discussions on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and on other channels, you will start to notice all the interesting things your audience might be pointing you to.

Don’t hesitate to use these ideas and incorporate them in your own content marketing strategy. Of course, it’s not appropriate to just cut and paste someone else’s idea, but you can always use it for inspiration, and modify it as per your requirements.

Adopting this strategy also ensures that you never run out of good content to share.

Involve your audience

Now that you’re sold on the idea of having a content calendar, you use it to plan discussions with your audience. If you are using Twitter to publish your content, start Twitter chats, and ask a question to get more engagement from your audience.

Once the Twitter chat is over, you can go through the tweets to see which ideas you can expand on for your next chunk of content that you will be publishing.

You can also do this on Facebook and LinkedIn, and gather interesting comments or opinions and consolidate all of that into one post. Once you have the post ready to go out, you can even mention the contributors in your post, and get them to share the content on their social media pages as well.

When it comes to social media, it’s all about hitting two birds with one stone. Keep an eye on your blog posts as well, and read the comments regularly. If you notice any interesting perspective, or a suggestion, you can create content to address that concern or suggestion.

This can be great for your audience; because they get the answers they want along with the satisfaction that their opinions are not going unheard.

If you think that content curation is really difficult, and that it is very time-consuming, these content curation strategies will be of great help. Once you employ them in your strategy, you will start noticing how easy the process can be and really how much fun you can have while curating content for all your channels.

Apurva Jog

Apurva Jog is a Content Writer at Godot Media, a leading content marketing firm. She has written several articles related to social media management and content marketing. Other than social media, she loves keeping up with films and music.

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3 comments

Curating content has many benefits including all the valuable information you can acquire for your research. I use most of the tools you mentioned Apurva, and another one that I’m a huge fan of is Scoop.it. Have you tried that one yet? Thanks for the post.

Leave a Reply:

Hi Ileane, personally I use Scoop.it on a regular basis, to identify interesting content to share with my audience and share on my social media networks, as well as all the tools that Apurva listed in her article. Thank you for commenting!

Leave a Reply:

An interesting article on curation. We have been very successful using curation as part of our content strategy. Scoop.it is fantastic as both a discovery and publishing tool. Also flashissue for curated newsletters, and another interesting publishing option is publicate. I am surprised that more sites do not actually publish through curation on their websites. Any feedback you can give on that? FULL Disclosure. I am the CEO of Internet Billboards.